The other day, I received a promotional email from Microsoft about Learn, their state-of-the-art e-learning platform. Wow! If you know anything about me, you know that I'm a curious guy, always on the lookout to discover new stuff and learn more about anything.

Obviously, Micro$oft being what they are, I approached this with a fair about of caution and skepticism. At the same time, I was genuinely intrigued to take a look at what they had to offer and whether it could hold any value for me. Spoiler alert: it doesn't.

First impressions

Things started off pretty well. Especially given Microsoft's reputation for shitty UI, Learn's clean and responsive interface was a welcome sight. I had a decent time browsing through the available courses and modules, even though it quickly became apparent that their editorial line was on full display, here more than anywhere else.

Sure, you can find some modules for Excel, Teams, .NET and whatnot if you go digging, but the homepage is all about AI and Copilot. If you follow me on Mastodon, you are probably aware that I am openly "anti-AI", insofar as I oppose the current stance of the tech industry regarding LLMs: the enshittification, the disregard for social, economical, and ecological fallout, as well as the overall delusion that surrounds what would otherwise simply be a nifty piece of technology.

Nonetheless, learning more about the theory behind modern machine learning tech from one of the companies that is the most involved in its very development sounds like a good time, so I plop open a module titled "Introduction to generative AI concepts".

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

I won't beat around the bush, the module was pretty boring. The writing is extremely bland in style and the content itself is... off. The different sections are disconnected from one another, and the quality varies between "corporate talking points" and "superficial definitions that are barely articulate". Maybe I'm not the target demographic for this kind of scattered introduction, but even for a newcomer to AI, I struggle to find any value for this sort of stuff.

Still, I pushed through the uninteresting units and reached the first "exercise". Awesome, time to get my hands dirty! After learning about LLMs, transformers, positional encoding and attention, the introduction states that I'm going to "explore a generative AI scenario" that "demonstrate how Generative AI agents can reason over input and data, and generate intelligent responses". How cool is that?

The first section is titled "Engage in a conversation with an AI agent" and it features an expenses chatbot for a fictional company. Here's a transcript of my conversation with it.

Bot: Hello — ask me about expense limits or how to submit a claim.

Me: How much can I spend on a meal? (This is one of the "sample" queries.)
Bot: You can claim up to $75.00 for a meal.

Me: What about dinner?
Bot: You can claim up to $75.00 for a meal.

Me: And for breakfast?
Bot: I'm sorry. I didn't understand your question. Please try rewording it. Note that I can only help with questions about expenses.

Me: What is the amount of money that I can use for a breakfast?
Bot: I'm sorry. I didn't understand your question. Please try rewording it. Note that I can only help with questions about expenses.

Me: What's the maximum I can claim for a hotel? (This is one of the "sample" queries.)
Bot:The maximum allowable expense for accommodation is $200.00 per night.

Huh. For what is supposed to be someone's first look at an "AI agent", it sure seems pretty dumb.

I couldn't help but notice that this agent is hosted through GitHub pages by the looks of the URL.

https://microsoftlearning.github.io/mslearn-ai-sims/sims/expenses_agent

From there, it was easy to find the code repository for this agent.

https://github.com/MicrosoftLearning/mslearn-ai-sims/blob/main/sims/expenses_agent/script.js

If you haven't guessed already (or if you didn't read the title of this post), this is absolutely not what anyone would call an "AI agent". It's more akin to a script that a high-school student would write for their Programming 101 class. All it does is scan the "prompt" for common keywords and return static predefined responses.

...

I was at a loss for words. Microsoft, a multi-trillion-dollar company, in their very own introduction to what is supposed to be the greatest technological advancement of the century, couldn't be bothered to show you the real deal and instead decided to fall back on something a 12-year-old could write from scratch over the course of a week-end with an old programming manual.

To be completely fair with them, though, a couple of notes.

First, they did add a disclaimer in the instruction that, on a second read, is intended to tell you that this is "not a real AI agent".

In this simulated app, the agent’s understanding is limited. A real generative AI agent typically has much more versatility in understanding and generating language.

I still find the wording to be somewhat misleading, as they refer to their script as "the agent".

Second, I understand why they would do it this way: writing an agent that is reliable enough for this kind of exercise would be long, tedious and expensive, whereas a simulation of an agent like this can be set up in less than half an hour and it's enough to illustrate what an agent is supposed to be.

But then again, none of this removes any of the irony of the situation. How unconfident in the technology do you have to be to avoid using it in your own learning resources about it?

Conclusion

Anyway, I am going to keep using Microsoft Learn, but instead of looking for interesting learning opportunities, it's now all for shits and giggles at the expense of the big AI-pushing dummies at Micro$oft.